Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Dick Lindzen on cold and heat extremes

Gavin Schmidt and Richard Alley made some comments on extreme weather here.

Dick Lindzen (via email) on cold and heat extremes:

"Gavin and Alley both seem pretty ignorant. Extremes of both cold and heat depend on advection by baroclinic eddies. This should get weaker in a warmer climate (assuming polar amplification which is another dicey matter). Alley is assuming that one just adds the change in global mean temperature to any current extreme. Marc shouldn’t be so defensive. He’s not dealing with experts. On the other hand, perhaps it should be noted that the reduction in extremes is ‘consistent’ with global warming."

1 comment:

A very small portion of the Moon's surface where the Sun is almost directly overhead receives a flux of just over 1,360 watts per square meter and, as the Stefan-Boltzmann Law in physics tells us, that flux will (and does) achieve an equilibrium temperature of just over 120°C. But the average temperature of the Moon's surface is well below 0°C. On Earth about half of the Sun's radiation never reaches the surface because it is reflected by the atmosphere or absorbed by so-called "greenhouse" gas such as water vapor, ozone, carbon dioxide and methane. So the solar radiation impinging on Earth's surface could only achieve an average temperature well below the Moon's sub-zero average temperature, and calculations show it would be below -40°C. For Venus, the Solar radiation reaching its surface is less than 20 watts per square meter on average, so how could that explain a temperature of 460°C? It doesn't.

Dr James Hansen recognized this dilemma and (totally incorrectly) thought it must be radiation from the cold atmosphere somehow causing heat transfer into the warmer surface which was helping the Sun's radiation that reached the surface to raise that -40°C temperature. Climatologists worked out (incorrectly anyway) that an extra 324 watts per square meter (about twice the average solar radiation) would be needed to explain the surface temperature, and that's the figure that went into NASA energy diagrams as seen on this page: http://whyitsnotco2.com/PSI.html.

The atmosphere certainly does send radiation to the surface, but calculations show it could not be as much as that 324 figure. In any event, radiation never causes heat transfer into a target that is warmer than the source of the radiation because it is merely pseudo-scattered, as physicists in the 21st century have realized and explained. So NASA and the IPCC are wrong on two counts and radiation of any form that reaches a planet's surface is not the primary determinant of the mean temperature of that surface. The so-called "trapping" of energy up in the cold atmosphere supposedly causes extra "back" radiation included in that 324 figure, but it does not explain the temperature in the first place, let alone any rise in such.

Referring back to that -40°C, what would be needed was far more than the "33 degrees" of warming you can read about in the "Glossary" on the IPCC website. James Hansen's guesswork backed the wrong horse, as we now know from more facts about the Solar System. For example, there is no solar radiation and no solid surface at the base of the nominal troposphere of Uranus, yet it's over 45°C on average down there. That single fact is sufficient to prove wrong the radiative forcing greenhouse conjecture.

If you want to know what really happens you will only find it in my writings as I have been first in the world to explain how the temperatures and the required heat transfers occur on all planets in all galaxies.

Douglas Cotton B.Sc (physics), B.A.(economics), Dip.Bus.Admin - retired scientist, educator and now researcher into Atmospheric Physics and Climate Change, Author of published articles and papers thereon, including "Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures" and the book "Why It's Not Carbon Dioxide After All" and the websites http://earth-climate.com http://climate-change-theory.com and blog https://itsnotco2.wordpress.com.